Basic service set (Basic Service Set, BSS) is a basic element of a wireless local area network, which is composed of stations (Station, STA for short/Stations, STAs for short) within a specific overlay area and with a specific relevance. A common relevance mode of stations in a BSS is that each STA therein is associated to a central station which specializes in basic service set management, the central station is called an access point (Access Point, AP). At present, a main application scenario is the sensor network, such as smart grid (Smart. Grid, SG), where the number of STAs supported by an AP can be up to 6000. If the STAs have intensive operations, there will be a large number of STAs which need to send data to the AP within a period of time, then the STAs which are sending data may suffer a high probability of collision, which will easily cause network congestion.
In a wireless communication system adopting distributed access, for example a wireless local area network (WLAN, Wireless Local Area Network), the precondition of accessing a channel is that all stations (including normal user-oriented stations and the AP) are regarded as equal STAs. The access mode is that each STA contends for a channel by way of randomly generating a backoff time in a contention window (Contention Window, CW) and progressively decreasing to zero.
When network congestion occurs due to sending data by a large number of STAs, a method in prior art for easing network congestion is called “binary exponential backoff”. In existing method, once a STA which is sending data meets with a collision, then the STA will resend (also called retransmit) the data; further, when the number of retransmission times does not reach a maximum number of data packet retransmission times, the STA doubles the CW, that is to double the contention window CW1 to 2CW1, and randomly selects an integer in an uniform distribution of range [0, 2CW1] to calculate a needed backoff time, and then resends the data when the backoff time is up. If a collision occurs when sending the data even when the calculated backoff time is up, the STA enlarges the contention window to 4CW1, and randomly selects an integer in an uniform distribution of range [0, 4CW1] to calculate a needed backoff time, and then resends the data when the backoff time is up, until the contention window is enlarged to a preset maximum value CWmax.
In the above existing binary exponential backoff, the STA will double the contention window only when meeting with a collision, in addition, only the STAs which meet with collisions will double the contention window, which contributes limited control for congestion of the whole network. During serious network congestion, each STA may possibly contend for a channel after multiple collisions by using the above existing binary exponential backoff method, so as to resend the data, which suffers multiple times of unsuccessful retransmission, through the channel Therefore, the method for controlling network congestion provided by the prior art has problems of long time consumption and low efficiency.